Band Samples Binary Star System's Sounds for Reggae Tune

Share

Band Samples Binary Star System's Sounds for Reggae Tune

Lemuel Montejo

*By Liat Clark, Wired UK*Data gathered from two stars using the Kepler telescope has been transformed into a reggae riff for an American band.

[partner id="wireduk"]

New Jersey reggae-rock group Echo Movement, whose body of work includes the songs "In the Beginning," "Across the Universe" and "I Think God Smokes Weed," approached the Georgia Tech Sonification Lab with the unusual request.

"People have made music with space sounds before, but largely using pulsars and space events that can be recorded in the radio spectrum," said band member David Fowler. "We wanted something completely off the chart."

The Kepler space telescope's day job is hunting down exoplanets – it has found 2,321 Earth-like candidates to date – so it fit the bill for the band. "Discovering planets around other stars is a relatively new science worthy of everyone's attention and digs deep at the core of humanity's most basic quest to orient itself in reality," said Fowler.

Echo Movement, who mix reggae rhythms with ethereal melodies in their music, did not want to play around with the data sequence simply to achieve a good beat. Instead, they wanted to insert the star's original sound straight into a composition.

With this in mind, the Sonification Lab extracted numerical data from two stars – binary stars Kepler 4665989 and Kepler 10291683.

Every time Kepler 4665989's neighboring star crossed its path, it dimmed and brightened, creating a rhythmic sequence the team could work with. They input the corresponding numerical data into Sonification Sandbox software to create sonified musical pitches, then cleared up the signal and removed any ambient sound they could. From this, Echo Movement created a four-part harmony by looping the sequence. Data from Kepler 10291683 added a more natural-sounding tremolo effect.

The resulting six-second melody (.wav) is already playable, but the finished product can only be heard in September when the band releases its song.

When it's not mixing reggae tracks, the Sonification Lab – which joins Georgia Tech's schools of psychology and interactive computing – develops ways of presenting visual data as sound. The practical applications of their research span aiding the visually impaired to relaying information in "complex task environments," such as cockpits or within the space program.

"Sound is the best pattern-recognition tool we have," said Bruce Walker, the lab's lead professor. "Instead of visually scanning through a long list of numbers, looking for patterns or random occurrences, sometimes it's easier to create an audio file and listen for them. Very interesting patterns can often be discovered by using sound."